The eyesight conundrum
Yesterday – some six months after I received a reminder from my local high street chain – I toddled along for my latest eye test, my two previous ones having been in 2014 and 2011 (as I learned minutes into my exam).
Now in my mid-sixties I have had a so-so relationship with eye tests and glasses probably caused by two factors. Firstly, the fact that my eyesight was fine until I reached my mid-forties so I gave it little thought or attention and, secondly, I’m an average-looking guy with one ear seemingly fixed higher on the side of my head than the other and I’ve never considered myself a glasses person because when I don a pair I look like a twat who’s wearing them for a comedic bet, i.e. rather than one of those lucky folk who look so comfortable and natural wearing glasses that either you cannot imagine them not wearing them and/or they genuinely look odd whenever they take them off.
For similar reasons my understanding of how human biology and sight works is limited. When it comes to teeth, for example, I once visited a dentist who told me that human teeth were only designed to last 45 years and that’s why we should all look after them – I took that on board and it seemed to make sense.
When it comes to eyesight, I have two fixed points of reference borne of received opinion.
The first is that, being mortal beings, our eyes tend to deteriorate gradually after the age of forty and there’s nothing that can be done to prevent it: resorting to aids such as spectacles or contact lenses are ways of coping with the issue.
The second came from a pal of mine who wears glasses (and this was confirmed yesterday by the lady who tested me yesterday): one piece of advice worth taking on board is that putting off resorting to glasses – either for reasons of vanity or the belief that doing so tends to accelerate the decline in one’s sight – is foolhardy. It’s a fact of life that sight deteriorates naturally and will continue to do so whether you accept the help of artificial aids or not. Thus, putting off using them is pointless – it is not going to arrest the rate of decline – and, rather than straining our eyes by not using them, we’d all be far better off relaxing and accepting the benefits of being able to see the world around once again as vividly as perhaps we did in our days of yore.
But I digress. Let’s get back to my relationship with glasses.
Perhaps seduced by the whole process of going to a shop and being tested, when I gained my first prescription I naturally ‘bought into’ (and bought) everything that I was offered. Via progression in steps, by the time of my last eye test in 2014 I had opted for varifocals with the extra gizmo on top that my Rolls Royce-standard glasses would magically self-tint when exposed to bright sunlight. Okay, so the whole kaboosh stripped me of circa £600’s worth of cash, but I had figured that the combination of being able to see once again in 3 (or even 4) D definition … and, given the right choice of spectacle rims … also becoming wholly irresistible to the opposite sex at my advanced stage of life, seemed cheap(ish) at the price.
Dear reader, the results were somewhat disappointing on both fronts.
Most dramatically, I never got used to my varifocals. Both the experts and family and friends advised that they’d seem a bit strange to begin with but – provided I persevered – within a few weeks, okay maybe a couple of months, wearing them would become as natural as going to the bathroom.
It never happened. After about a month of walking, about or sitting, constantly moving my head around like someone with Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy or one of those ‘nodding dogs’ you see in the back windows of motor vehicles in the cause of trying to find the right section of my glasses to look through and get the correct focus, I became dispirited, fed up and eventually resentful. I then took matters into my own hands by going into Boots chemist and buying a set of ‘cheap and cheerful’ spectacles (essentially magnifying glasses) – self-prescribed in the sense that I chose them by trying various strengths (+1, +1.5 etc.) and testing which one ‘suited’ my eyes best in terms of reading easily the backs of nearby packs of medicines – and simply resorted to using them as reading glasses whenever the need arose.
And that’s how I’ve operated ever since to the present day. I usually have two or three sets of such glasses ‘on the go’ and, whenever I lose one – or mistakenly leave one behind when I go travelling – I’ve simply bought more pairs from the nearest chemists on hand. At £25 to £30 a pop it also feels so much easier and cheaper (use according to need etc.).
On the second front (sex appeal), I didn’t fare much better.
As hinted above, I don’t consider myself a Hollywood movie star in the looks stakes which is why I’ve never bothered too much about my appearance.
Although I took no notice of it at the time – and I mean that in terms of neither feeling ashamed/embarrassed, nor indeed proud of it as if it was somehow an outsider’s badge of honour to swank about (to be honest it was a fact) – I was once given a name-check by the headmaster in an assembly at my prep school as the scruffiest and most untidy boy the school had ever enrolled.
A consequence of the above is that I’m no good (and have rarely paid interest in) what I wear or how I look. Applying this theme to the task of choosing spectacle frames, it means that I have a hard time of it trying to decide ‘what suits me’ in terms of facial features, head shape and the other factors that should be taken into account, and often are, when others go about this particular business.
These babies had the plusses of not only matching my prematurely-silver hair colouring but having a slight speckled design effect on the side of the temples [also known as the ‘arms’, the bits that actually secure your glasses to your head] which I felt added a slight note of eccentricity that somehow connected with my personality and would also add a certain quirkiness that ladies would find intriguing, if not attractive, on a primeval/lust level.
Two weeks later, when the optician’s store called me to announce the arrival of my new glasses ‘ready for collection’, I sped into town and returned home with mounting excitement to spend the afternoon admiring myself in the mirror in said items before carefully putting them away, ready for the big ‘reveal’ when my wife and two daughters arrived home in time for our evening dinner.
Some time later, as dessert was cleared away I volunteered to make the coffees and ushered my companions to sit at the table whilst I disappeared into the kitchen where I had hidden my new pair of glasses in a drawer.
My re-entry to the dining room carrying a tray of coffee cups and a cafetiere caused a stunned silence which may have lasted only as little as five seconds but felt like five minutes, followed by much female hilarity.
The generational difference in the comments was stark: my daughters, during short breaks in their hysterics, told me that I looked as camp as a row of tents in my new purchases, whilst my spouse gave me a heavy dose of the Spanish Inquisition built around the repeated enquiry “You spent how much on these?”
It may not surprise my readers that since that evening I haven’t had much occasion to wear what my daughter’s constantly delight in referring to as “Dad’s gay glasses” at all family and other gatherings.
Anyway. Yesterday I departed the opticians having been told I may have the beginnings of a cataract; that otherwise I seemed generally healthy and only slightly degenerated sight-wise since my last visit; and, having chosen another new pair of spectacles to go with my new prescription, another £600-odd poorer with a seven-to-ten-days wait until they come back ready for collection.
God knows what I’m going to look like in them, but I fear the worst.
